Ugly As Sin Read Online Free Page A

scurrying backstage after every show, practically biting and clawing at one another for a chance to meet him. Even following the birth of his reviled Widowmaker character—when he had ditched his do-gooder babyface role once and for all—there had been no shortage of sluts. Sometimes he asked for their names when it was over. Usually he didn’t. He’d never given a damn anyway.
    Melissa’s mother, though...she’d been different.
    Before the fame, before the hangers-on and the skanks throwing themselves at his feet, Arlene had truly loved him.
    Once upon a time, they shared something special.
    They’d been high school sweethearts. But what really made Nick fall for her was her selfless dedication toward helping him pursue his goals. She never scoffed at his dream of becoming a professional wrestler, had stood by him as he paid his proverbial dues first as a student of Big Jim Brogan’s Five-Star Wrestling School in Midnight, North Carolina, then when he was hired on as a bottom-tier rookie in the Global Wrestling Association several years later. She never left his side, figuratively at least, even after their relationship became a long-distance affair, when he traveled from coast to coast working the dark matches. Though the lovebirds wished they could be together twenty-four seven, Nick barely made enough dough to feed himself back then. He had sworn to her that one day their sacrifices would pay off. And when that day finally came, he vowed to treat her like a queen.
    Then Arlene got pregnant.
    He found out about it ten minutes before his first televised match, when his stomach was already doing somersaults and he’d been sure he was gonna puke his guts out.
    Almost immediately, upon receiving the news, Nick began to distance himself from this young lady he once thought he loved more than anything else in the world.
    The moment she informed him that he was going to be a father, things changed .
    He wasn’t proud of it. But that was who he had been back then. The Nick Bullman of three decades ago—the hungry kid who had worked so hard to prove to his superiors and the fans that he would one day be the best in the Biz—hadn’t been willing to slam on the brakes so abruptly. He refused to put his dreams on hold in order to accept this new responsibility.
    He wasn’t ready to be a father. A husband. A nobody. He was ready to be a star .
    He had tried to rationalize his behavior. Tried to convince himself, even as he failed to show up again and again when he promised to visit Arlene and little Melissa, that he was doing the right thing. Giving fatherhood his best shot, while keeping his eyes on the Big Picture.
    Hard to be a devoted family man, though, when you’re in Hawaii one week, Tokyo the next. Meanwhile, said family sits in their drafty mobile home in the mountains of North Carolina, waiting for your call.
    The years sped by, and while Nick never vanished completely from his daughter’s life, the occasions when he did make time for her grew further and further apart. Eventually, Arlene moved on. She told him she could no longer commit herself to a man who might as well have been a ghost, a man who had severed ties with those who loved him because the only person in the world he ever truly cared about was himself .
    In what felt like the blink of an eye, Nick Bullman’s little girl was no longer a little girl at all.
    The last time he had seen his daughter she was nineteen years old. Now her thirtieth birthday was just a few months away. If he remembered correctly.
    His regret was like some parasitic worm coiled inside of him. It had been dormant for a while, but now it awoke to feed again.
    A sniffle on the other end of the line brought him back to the present: “Daddy? Are you there?”
    “I’m here,” Nick replied.
    His voice was a pitiful croak. He cleared his throat, said it again.
    “Yeah, baby...I’m here.”
     
    †
     
    “Daddy, I need you.”
    “Melissa...”
    Her voice grew thick, wet,